medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

Leo of Catania (d. 7th or 8th cent.; also known as Leo the Thaumaturge). From 591 to 604 pope St. Gregory the Great wrote a number of letters to a bishop of Catania named Leo, mentioning him as well in letters directed to others. In one of the latter (_ep._ 14 Ewald-Hartmann), Leo is said to act severely against illdoers (_malefici_), possibly magicians. This historically attested figure is thought to underlie the legendary saint Leo, bishop of Catania in the eighth century. So imagined, Leo is the hero of a Bios surviving in a polished longer version thought to have been written somewhere in the Greek east (BHG 981b; variously dated to the eighth or ninth century and from the location of its surviving witness sometimes called the Moscow version) and of a shorter and, in its surviving witnesses, somewhat truncated version written somewhere in the Greek west (BHG 981; dated to the late eighth or earlier ninth century and presumed to have originated in Sicily). The dates of both versions are conjectural.

Of the two, BHG 981 seems to be closer in content and in arrangement to their now lost ancestor. This Italo-Greek text (which also exists in a slightly fuller Latin translation, BHL 4838) makes Leo an overseer of church property at Ravenna who in the absence of acceptable local candidates was chosen to fill the see of Catania, who struggled mightily with an evil and blasphemous thaumaturge named Heliodorus, and who cured a woman of a hitherto incurable bloody flux (on which latter cf. Luke 8:43-48). Most of this Bios concerns the struggle with Heliodorus (a.k.a. Liodorus), in which Leo operates holy magic to overcome the achievements of his diabolically inspired and imperially condemned opponent, capturing him with his stole after he had profaned a service at Catania and, without damage either to his own hand or to the stole, holding him in a fire until he is burned to death. In the Latin version Leo also destroys a pagan cult statue surviving from the days of the emperor Decius.

Leo's cult travelled widely in the Byzantine world. In the Synaxary of Constantinople his feast falls on 21. February; in other calendars he's remembered on 20. February. Apart from the aforementioned Bioi he is the subject of Greek hymns by the ninth-century St. Joseph the Hymnographer and by the eleventh-century St. Bartholomew of Grottaferrata, of a verse Bios (BHG 981c) preserved in the first volume (cod. Messanensis gr. 30) of the famous menologion written in 1307 or 1308 for the monastery of Santissimo Salvatore dell'Acroterio / in lingua Phari at Messina, and of the Latin hymns in his late medieval Office at Catania. Though he had been celebrated liturgically in the Siculo-Calabrian corner of the medieval Latin west, where he was the titular of several churches, Leo entered the Roman Martyrology in the 1580s from Greek liturgical practice as represented by a translation into Latin of the so-called Menologion of Sirlet. In the RM his day of commemoration has always been 20. February. 

Heliodorus has survived at Catania in the name (U Liotru) of the mostly basalt late antique elephant which in the Middle Ages stood over one of the city gates and which led Arabic-speakers to refer to Catania as Medina el-fil ("City of the Elephant"). The city's official symbol since 1239, in the eighteenth century it was made part of a sculptural confection adorning a fountain in the Piazza Duomo:
http://tinyurl.com/lfossp9
http://tinyurl.com/mrgfdst

Best,
John Dillon
(matter from an older post now revised)

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